“After seven years of double credit for online flight bookings, Southwest is calling the promotion quits. Southwest loyalists have until December 31 to book tickets online and earn four credits per round-trip flight.” [Smarter Living]

This means that I’ll be earning only 6 free Southwest tickets per year. And unless they lower the present 100 credit threshold, I’m going to lose my Companion Pass next year. Oh well. All good things must come to an end.

I didn’t make it to the Code Sprint today, but Andrei was leading one of the sections, so I’ll get the skinny from him. I really dig the idea — get programmers to pay for the opportunity to contribute their brainpower to an Open Source project.

I got email from the owner of RestaurantWatch.com asking me to link to his website. I took a look, and it definitely got some good content.

I was surprised to discover that 98% of restaurants get a rating of A or B from the Health Department. Either Los Angeles retaurants are really very healthy or grade inflation extends beyond high school and college.

It turns out that you can get much of the same information directly from the LA DHS, but RestaurantWatch.com provides a better UI.

JR convinced me to switch last month. Even though I’ve been absurdly busy with Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Sukkot, I’m happy I initiated the switch.

For about the same price, DreamHost gives me more of what I want: more disk space, ability to manage fowarding email addresses without having to bother a sysadmin or trust myself to procmail, mod_php compiled directly into Apache, phpMyAdmin already pre-installed, etc.

The Diamond Age was good, but not as enjoyable as Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon. It looks like Stephenson just came out with a new tome. Maybe I’ll find time to read that in 2004.

I’ve been reading bits and pieces of The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick and Effective C++ by Scott Meyers, but neither of those books is compelling enough to sit down and read straight through.

Ariella just bought me a used copy of Meyer Levin’s Classic Hassidic Tales. I was reading a bit of it over Yom Kippur and it’s great. I like short stories.

This week at LAX I picked an audio CD of Steve Martin reading his new book The Pleasure of My Company. I read Shopgirl right when it came out almost 3 years ago and found it surprisingly good, so I’m hoping for another winner. I ripped all of the tracks to my iPod today so I’ll be able to listen to it on the plane. If I listen every week on the plane, I’ll finish it by mid-November.